Online gaming is one of the most profitable businesses on the
Internet. Of all the genres of online games, MMORPGs (Massive
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) have become the most popular
among network gamers, and now attract millions of users who play in
an evolving virtual world simultaneously over the Internet. To gain
a better understanding of game traffic and contribute to the
economic well-being of the Internet, we analyze a
1,356-million-packet trace from a sizeable MMORPG called ShenZhou Online. This
work is, as far as we know, the first formal analysis of MMORPG
server traces.

We find that MMORPG and FPS (First-Person Shooting) games are
similar in that they both generate small packets and require low
bandwidths. In practice, the bandwidth requirement of MMORPGs is
the lower of the two due to less real-time game playing. More
distinctive features are the strong periodicity, temporal locality,
irregularity, and self-similarity observed in MMORPG traffic. The
periodicity is due to a common practice in game implementation,
where game state updates are accumulated within a fixed time window
before transmission. The temporal locality in game traffic is
largely due to the game's nature, whereby one action leads to
another. The irregularity, which is unique to MMORPG traffic, is
due to the diversity of the game's design so that the behavior of
users can vary drastically, depending on the quest at hand. The
self-similarity of the aggregate traffic is due to the heavy-tailed
active/idle activities of individual players. Moreover, we show that
the arrival of game sessions within one hour can be modelled by a
Poisson model, while the duration of game sessions is heavy-tailed.